PROFILE -- Beth Rocker dedicates her life to helping others

Jennifer Hambrick Published: July 22, 2007 4:01 AM

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Beth Rocker still remembers March 1, 1994. That was the day her father killed her mother.

But Rocker, 28, has lived on, dedicating her life to helping other people.

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Columbus Sate Community College recently honored Rocker's achievements in service and leadership with the 2007 outstanding woman student leader award. The award is given to up to 10 students each year as part of Women's History Month programming.

CSCC head track coach Nicole Lovett and athletic director M.D. Ferguson said they nominated Rocker for the award based on her demonstrated leadership of the college's track and cross-country teams as well as her scholarship and service to the broader Columbus community.

"She's going to go out every day to be the best she can be, and she inspires that in her teammates," Ferguson said. 'If all of Columbus State's teams were like Beth Rocker, we would be in the NBA finals or the World Series. She applies that to everything she does, that dogged determination."

Rocker was determined to move beyond the traumatic events of that early March night when she was just 14. The night her father, Law Director Andrew J. Rocker, shot her mother, Sharon Rocker, five times in front of their home.

She is determined to help make the world a better place.

Things were rough for Rocker during her high school years. But to see her through, she received intensive, individual counseling from the Children of Murdered Parents program of Directions for Youth and Families.

Rocker credits support groups and nutritional counseling at the formerly named Columbus Children's Hospital with her eventual recovery from anorexia nervosa. She says some of her high school teachers and athletic coaches became her mentors.

"[They told me] that I was strong and that I needed to stay strong for other people," Rocker said.

One of those other people was Rocker's brother, Michael, who was 13 when the shooting took place.

"She's always been there for me, helping me out," said Michael Rocker, 26. "She's a great inspiration. I don't really see anything get to her. She always has a lot of energy. She goes from one situation to the next thing in her day. She is definitely a leader. In any community that she goes to, she will volunteer."

When Rocker and her brother moved from Cambridge to their grandparents' Columbus home after the shooting, Rocker continued to volunteer as a youth swim team coach and began serving the community in many other ways.

She says her mother's strong commitment to tikkun olam still inspires her to pick up the broken piece of the world, whether through teaching Hebrew school at Temple Israel, volunteering for Mitzvah Corps or, as an employee of the Step by Step program of Franklin County Juvenile Court System, rescuing juvenile offenders at risk of committing additional offenses.

"I like to do things for other people because it makes me feel better, it makes them feel better, so that's a big healing process for myself," Rocker said. "And always keeping in the back of my head about my mom."

Ferguson says Rocker has even turned her participation on the track team and cross-country teams at Columbus State into opportunities to serve.

"One of my goals is to get all the teams out to do community service," Ferguson said. "Beth took a leadership role to try to get her teammates to meet and go to the food bank and try to pack for a couple hours."

"She was encouraging them to go out in the community and do some community service as a team. She wouldn't care if one person went or if all of them went. If she can get one person to go, then that's her little building block."

Rocker says she sees helping people as a calling, and borrows inspiration from the likes of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, both of whom she has met. She says she even carried on a brief correspondence with Mandela five years ago.

"I wrote him that my dad was in prison and (told him) what he had done, and I asked him about his (own) prison sentence, how he felt and what he did to stay strong," Rocker said. "And he offered me some words of wisdom."

Rocker said Mandela, writing through his assistant Richard Goldstone, encouraged her to visit her father, whom she had not seen since the beginning of his life sentence in October 1994, and to begin to change the course of their relationship.

In May, Rocker visited her father in prison.

"I have forgiven him," Rocker says, "but I will never forget."

In the meantime, Rocker is completing her work in Columbus State Community College's medical assisting program. She aims to become a psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner en route to completing a doctorate in childhood trauma and resiliency.

She will begin her nurse practitioner training in Israel, after making aliyah this September with her fiancé. She met him in 2000 while serving in the Volunteer for Israel program.

Though Rocker is excited about performing the mitzvah of making aliyah, she says there's another reason why she's moving to Israel.